Survival Mechanisms

As recently as 1945, much of the world was divided into great empires, while the Soviets were still carving out one of their own. All are gone now, and so too are most absolute monarchies. There is nothing permanent about political regimes. Today, Westerners increasingly worry about democracies sliding into autocracy, while Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin worry about colour revolutions (as in Ukraine) that threaten autocracy. The horror show of the second Trump administration is a daily reminder of how long-established norms and institutions can prove fragile.

With The Adaptable Country, Alasdair Roberts, a Canadian political scientist now at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, calls for realism about the prevalence of danger, the fragility of nation-states, and the need for political institutions to adjust strategy as circumstances continue to change. This is a timely book, especially given Canada’s need to deal with the brutal reality of Donald Trump, whose animus toward us, including talk of annexation, is creating a fundamental crisis for our federal and provincial leaders.

Roberts argues that for a state, being adaptable is different from being able to deal with crises, because adaptability focuses on strategy and longer-term challenges. But surely crisis management and longer-term strategic planning both require adaptability, and it is possible to do both at the same time. The classic example is the United Kingdom’s foundational Beveridge Report, which, during the dire crisis of 1942, recommended the establishment of a comprehensive welfare state once the war was over.

Roberts believes that Canada’s “federal-liberal-democratic” system has advantages that allow for adaptability, notably that it’s relatively open to self-criticism. He takes a generally positive view of our experience in the twentieth century, when royal commissions on federal-provincial relations (Rowell-Sirois), economic prospects (Gordon), health services (Hall), culture and the arts (Massey), and bilingualism and biculturalism (Laurendeau-Dunton) inspired substantial reforms. In addition, federal governments created advisory councils on welfare, the economy, science, legal reform, and other subjects. No royal commissions have been established since 1991, however, and most advisory councils were shut down in the early 1990s, with a few others dissolved by Stephen Harper’s government.

A loss in strategic policy capacity has coincided with developments that increase short-termism in our politics. The radical changes in communications technology come to mind, but a string of minority governments and cabinets with few seasoned ministers have also mattered. One of Roberts’s particular concerns is that parties increasingly put out detailed (often poorly researched) policy platforms during election campaigns, typically loaded with promises that could be realized quickly. He believes this practice enhances the power of the Prime Minister’s Office and leads to excessively detailed and myopic instructions to ministers. These platforms can’t foresee mega surprises, so they undermine a government’s ability to adapt. But surprise is a constant in leadership, and whether it’s a near-run referendum result in Quebec, the COVID‑19 pandemic, or an unhinged occupant in the White House, governments have shown an ability to move quickly in responding to unpredicted events. Moreover, the public service can still present proposals that are not in a campaign platform, as when the Department of Finance persuaded Jean Chrétien’s government to do a complete U‑turn on fiscal policy in Paul Martin’s axe-swinging budget of 1995.

Ottawa is only part of our decentralized federation, so it must talk to and work with the provinces. Beyond that, Roberts believes first ministers should lead in strategic thinking, and he deplores the decline of first ministers’ conferences, which have become rare and inconsequential. After searing existential debates around the Constitution, every prime minister since Chrétien has minimized meeting with the premiers. Roberts maintains that new threats to the union and rising public skepticism about federalism call for a revival of first ministers’ summits, which would reflect on longer-term challenges and build “trust ties.”

A first ministers’ meeting is intensely political, though, and it is hard to imagine the main players parking politics while they ponder multi-year visions. Prime ministers often see these encounters as a gang‑up of thirteen against one, with the provinces and territories demanding more money. While prime ministers generally do not view these meetings as useful forums for resolving issues, the current crisis with the Trump administration has led to apparently fruitful discussions on coordinated responses and even, after many limp efforts in the past, some serious moves to take down interprovincial trade barriers. So perhaps there is a place for these assemblies, at least if they have focused agendas; a meeting to reflect on protracted challenges would be certain to fail unless there were concrete options or proposals on the table.

Roberts is too quick to discount the other forums for federal-provincial dialogue. For example, the Canadian Intergovernmental Conference Secretariat logged at least ninety meetings of federal and provincial ministers or deputy ministers last year, plus thirty or so among provinces and territories. To this total must be added the countless bilateral contacts.

The dramatic erosion of constructive civil engagement, mainly because of technological change, is another of Roberts’s concerns. With the decline of the established press, the rise of social media and information silos, and the spread of abusive messages, the problem is clear and huge. Roberts is right that there has been a confused federal reaction, but all democratic governments seem to be floundering, with little more than marginal responses. Roberts proposes that politicians should rebuff the populist idea that intervention to create a healthier public sphere is an assault on freedom. He also suggests that the federal government should create a “Department for Democracy and Heritage,” noting that we’ve had ministers in the past for democratic reform, democratic renewal, and democratic institutions. Clearly we’re facing an existential challenge, but these suggestions don’t even start to address it.

Our public service is a central institution of governance that Roberts sees as increasingly cautious and uncreative. He attributes this weakness to the growth of administrative controls and the increasing role of political staff. Oversight of the public service was dramatically increased by the Harper government’s Accountability Act: it added three new officers of Parliament (for lobbying, conflict of interest and ethics, and public service integrity) to the existing ones (the auditor general and the commissioners for official languages, information, and privacy). It also created the Parliamentary Budget Office and required new independent audit committees for every department. The result, Roberts notes, has been an explosion of auditing and a “web of rules” that has shifted the focus to compliance and risk aversion.

As for political staff, federal ministers might have had four or five assistants forty years ago, but now senior ministers can have twenty to forty, with a total of 815 ministerial staff in 2024. The Prime Minister’s Office has played a central strategic role since at least the 1960s, but in recent years its size and its control function have ballooned, with constant burrowing into micro-issues and directives undercutting the authority and role of both ministers and deputy ministers. There is too much second-guessing and too many reporting demands. Here we need far-reaching reform.

That brings us to Roberts’s key recommendations for enhancing the adaptability of our system. In addition to more first ministers’ meetings, he proposes a royal commission on the country’s economic, social, cultural, environmental, and international prospects and another on the federal public service. Royal commissions have built links and depoliticized major issues in the past, and often they have led to major reforms. But at a time when the liberal values of the last century are in doubt, would politicians really turn these big questions over to unelected experts, who are derided by so many? Some might, but others would reject such methods out of hand. Roberts also promotes the German model of government-funded party foundations, which give parties the capacity to do serious policy work. Given the poor state of our parties, however, as well as public mistrust, the prospects of replicating that model here are not good. What might have a better chance, again depending on whom we elect, would be the reinvention of some of the advisory councils that were once prominent. And we should not simply discount the current public service.

Again, the Beveridge Report was produced in the midst of a war. That British experience shows what entrusting a significant strategic policy review to public service advisors can produce — in ways that are faster and cheaper than the deliberations of a royal commission. The point is to build the capacity and to shift expectations of what’s possible.

The British economic historian Adam Tooze talks of “polycrisis,” with the world confronting a whole series of interlinked problems, including climate change, mass migration, famines, wars, technological upheavals, debt, and risks of nuclear escalation. While Canadians continue to have an enviable place in the world, we face growing uncertainty. Most dramatically, even our close relationship with the United States can no longer be taken for granted. There is a pressing need to develop new capacity for crisis management and for in‑depth reflection on our longer-term challenges. The Adaptable Country helps make the case for action.